Judge prayed for humility

W
ayne Gross and I used to sit up on our third-floor balcony overlooking a fake lake and real palm trees, light up cigars, and talk about his plans to one day become of the president of the Orange County Bar Association, and my plans to one day go to law school.

On Thursday night, he became president of the bar association, and I missed it – because I was in law school. But while I did arrive at the annual bar association dinner too late to see him installed, I was in time to see
Francisco Firmat, one of the county's top judges, receive the legal community's highest honor.

In 1961, when Firmat was 11, his Cuban parents put him on a plane to the U.S. with a note pinned to his coat that said, “My name is Francisco Firmat. I speak no English.” It asked that whoever met the boy assist him in his safe arrival at a Catholic orphanage in Denver. With
Castro's rise, Firmat's parents saw no hope for Cuba. They got him out.

It reminded me of Superman's story: His parents, believing their planet doomed, put him on a spaceship, hoping strangers would care for him.

Firmat and his parents later reunited, he learned English, and he acquired a devotion to the faith that seems evident in his good works. After graduating from Western State in 1976, he went into law practice, then, in 1985, onto the bench. Over the past 27 years, he's made his mark in two major areas: civility and compassion, and reformation of Orange County's family courts system.

Upon putting on the black robe, he says, he prayed. He prayed the Prayer of Solomon for wisdom, the Prayer of St. Francis to be made a channel of God's peace, and prayed, simply, he says, “to be small.” He prayed God would remove “his ego's need to be liked … and to be right.” If he insisted on being liked, he feared he wouldn't be fair to out-of-town lawyers because he'd want to be liked by the lawyers he saw every day. “Cases are going to get hometowned,” he said. If he insisted on being right, he risked taking the bench with a preconceived idea of the outcome and wouldn't really be hearing the litigants.

In 2004, he took over family-law courts – 17 courts that oversee cases involving divorce, custody, domestic violence and elder abuse. He was particularly attentive to the needs of people who didn't have a lawyer and those who didn't speak English. He emphasized informal settlement conferences to reduce the parties' anxiety. The California Judicial Council gave him an Access to Justice Award in 2008, saying he “cultivated a spirit among judges and staff that calls for them to serve the public as if their own family members were involved in the case.”

The Franklin G. West Award he received Thursday is for lifetime achievement. After he steps down Feb. 25, he said, he'll spend time each month at the Legal Aid Society and the Public Law Center. I don't think anyone was surprised to hear that.

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